Hell on Earth
As his Booker Prize-winning novel comes to our screens, author Richard Flanagan reflects on his father’s wartime experiences
BBC
- Craig McLean
Add The Narrow Road to the Deep North to your watchlist
Ad
In Syria in 1941, an army medic tries and fails to save a comrade eviscerated by a landmine. In Australia in 1989, a Second World War veteran, asked by a journalist what it felt like to be a prisoner of war forced to work on Burma’s “Death Railway”, brusquely replies: “Feelings weren’t as fashionable as they are now. We did what we were told.”
These fractured, overlapping, narratives belong to one man, Dorrigo Evans, whose history unfolds in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, BBC1’s five-part adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name. Evans is played in his younger years by Jacob Elordi (Priscilla, Saltburn) and in his older years by Ciarán Hinds (Kin, Belfast).
Jacob Elordi, left, with the cast of the 2023 film Saltburn. Amazon
The story centres on the experiences of the 13,000 Australian PoWs forced by their Japanese captors to work on the construction of a 258-mile railway linking Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar). Working in unfathomably horrific conditions, 2,800 of them – more than one in five – died building the line.
But The Bridge on the River Kwai this is not. Flanagan’s book, brilliantly adapted by Australian director Justin Kurzel (True History of the Kelly Gang), is a masterful, mesmerising account of decades-deep love and resilience; of camaraderie (“mateship” in Australian culture); of the myriad, complex legacies of those PoWs’ experiences.
It is inspired by the Australian author’s own father’s experiences. Arch Flanagan’s lifelong insistence on clothes being folded correctly (with the fold on the inside, not the outside) was but one outward manifestation of the brutal regime he barely survived. “I grew up as a child of the Death Railway, as did all my siblings,” Flanagan says from his home in Tasmania. “It was everywhere about us. My father had no interest in material things. He had no interest in achievement. He didn’t rate success, as we conventionally understand it, as important. What mattered to him was whether people were good and kind to each other.
“He found derisory faux ideas of courage,” he continues of a parent who, in a tragic twist, died on the day that Flanagan told him that he had completed writing the novel. “For him, courage was a single mother trying to make ends meet and bring up a family. It was in everything. There was nothing that wasn’t shaped by it.”
War makes everyone have to share in the guilt. That's the true evil of it
The Narrow Road to the Deep North has had a long road to screen, with an earlier attempt unstuck by film company leadership changes and then Covid. But when production was finally greenlit, Flanagan was clear about how the book, a bestseller that has become freighted with national resonance and significance in Australia, should be adapted.
“Another lifetime ago, I directed a film of one of my novels,” the author says of 1998’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping. “What I learned from that was that you should never seek to replicate a novel in film or television. They’re absolutely different media. I wanted Justin to direct it, and all I asked of him was that he simply made something that was true to what he found in the book. And what I saw was that he made it with a huge love and passion.”
During pre-production the author talked with Elordi and the other young actors playing the PoWs. “I tried to remind them of the strange and incommunicable nature of that experience. There was a solidarity, but it was a strange and terrible solidarity at times. The horror of war is that it demands of young men that they do things that in any other sphere of life we would rightly lock them up in prison for ever for.
“If they’re lucky enough to survive such terrible things, they’re then condemned to having to live with the knowledge of what they’ve done in war. In a sense, war makes everybody complicit. It makes everyone have to share in the guilt. That’s the true evil of it.”
The production was based outside Sydney, in New South Wales, with even the harrowing jungle scenes vividly re-created in the Australian wilds. Visiting the set during filming from late 2023 to spring last year, Flanagan was struck by the esprit de corps among the cast and crew. “There was a commitment such as I’d never seen on any other film or TV project. They really believed this story mattered.”
Jacob Elordi as Dorrigo Evans. BBC/Curio Pictures/Sony Pictures Television
Flanagan was present for some of the most intense prisoner of war scenes. “These young men had starved themselves for about three months. They were physically in a completely different dimension, so that they moved entirely differently. When they looked at you, they fixed you with this intense stare, and then their eyes would drift away into the distance. They had a very odd energy about them that was responding to what Justin told them, and then utterly unresponsive at the same time.
“The set had a strange, almost incantatory feeling about it,” adds Flanagan, a man whose thoughtful, eloquent, rolling speaking style has its own incantatory feeling. “It was an oddly moving place.”
Flanagan goes on to recall his father’s words to him. “He said to me once that they were lucky there, because they only had to suffer. It took me many years to understand what he meant. But what he meant was, when you’re a soldier, your job is to inflict suffering – and that’s actually worse than having to suffer yourself.
“He slowly forgot the violence. He forgot the sickness. He forgot the horror. In the end, he was left with stories of kindness and goodness; the way a certain mutuality, the comradeship, sustained them. The whole lesson that he took from the camps was that the measure of a good society is the extent to which the strong help the weak, and any society that doesn’t do that is a failure. Whether the society is a family, a community or a nation, that’s the measure of it: the extent to which the strong will reach down to help the weak and the sick and carry them all and lift them all up.
“He distilled the whole experience into this simple idea of love and goodness. That’s what he took from it. He didn’t gloss over the horror of it. He just ultimately felt that wasn’t the lesson of it.”
Flanagan acknowledges that Kurzel’s series is “a darker vision than mine”. But in terms of ensuring a wide audience, their ace is their leading man. Brisbane-born Elordi is one of the hottest, in every sense of the term, young actors in the world right now – a status that the 28-year-old’s lead role in Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights will only deepen. How important will the actor’s celebrity (alongside his acting skills) be in bringing his novel and his father’s experiences, to Elordi’s millennial peers?
In the end, my father forgot the horror and was left with stories of kindness
“Really important,” the writer replies. He points out that, in Australia, where the series has already aired, Elordi’s fandom “has taken this to a generation that’s completely unaware of this story. Jacob was extraordinary, because he committed in a way that I was really surprised by. There was great humility to him about the way he went about this role.
“In an odd way, he brought the pathos of his generation to the role,” he continues, drawing parallels with what his father’s era experienced. “As war bore down on Australia, the old men who ran the country were terrified. They felt, as the old always feel about the young, that the young men were a worthless generation because they’d come through the Depression. They felt they weren’t up to it.
“I think that millennials, similarly, are a generation that have come through a bleak time and who are condemned by their elders. There’s an odd mirroring of the experience of the millennials and the experience of that generation that unfortunately found themselves having to go off into that most terrible war.”
Richard Flanagan, left, and Justin Kurzel. Getty
In the non-chronological spirit of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, let’s end almost at the beginning. Kurzel said earlier this year: “Richard always said to me, the most important thing to him was the tapestry of different time changes.” I ask Flanagan if he can unpack that idea. He replies that the director would often come to him with questions about the story. “But I said: ‘If the answer isn’t what you want, you go with whatever your instinct is.’ But with the structure of it, which is around this fractured time, I did say: ‘I think you will find that is the one fundamental aspect of it that you won’t be able to abandon and create in another form. Because, as William Faulkner said, the past is always present.”
The problem with war and violence is that, as Flanagan puts it, “it doesn’t stop at the moment of the blow, the beating, the bullet. The wound grows and grows. It spreads out into families and then into communities, and then into nations.
“At some point, it falls to others to somehow address that. If you’re to live in the light, you’ve got to walk back into that darkness, and you’ve got to acknowledge that that time isn’t gone, that it still lives within us. Once you’ve done that, you can come back and live in the light.”
Ad
So, he concludes, that’s what Kurzel meant. “And that’s one thing from the novel that he did retain. But look, above all, I was just very honoured that a film-maker of Justin’s calibre – he’s the greatest director working in Australia today – took this on.
And he made something extraordinary and unique.”
Authors
Craig McLean
Ad
Ad
Get the Christmas double issue
Too much to watch at Christmas? Let Radio Times do the choosing to find something the whole family will enjoy.
Loading...
Ad
Loading...